


Emotions and Other Hazardous Activities

by blueelvewithwings



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexuality, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff, Getting Together, Idiots that don't know how to deal with Emotions(tm), Injured!Ray, Multi, Neurodivergent Mick, Neurodivergent Ray, Pining, Sickfic, quarantined
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:02:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23930509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueelvewithwings/pseuds/blueelvewithwings
Summary: Mick insists that they take with them when Len rescues him from the Gulag. He only does so to repay a debt. Really, it has nothing to do with emotions. Mick doesn't do those, anyway.(Or maybe, he does?)
Relationships: Mick Rory/Leonard Snart, Ray Palmer/Mick Rory/Leonard Snart
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55
Collections: Arrowverse Under Quarantine





	Emotions and Other Hazardous Activities

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the Arrowverse Quarantine Fic exchange, where my giftee was Raysatom. I hope you'll like what I made out of your prompt! My prompt was sick/injured for Coldatom or Coldwave (with permission to smoosh the two together....which I all too happily did) :)
> 
> Thanks to Soph for gorgeous beta-reading <3

“He took a beating for me.” Mick said it as if just like that, it was set in stone that they would take Raymond along, simply because he’d taken a few hits for him. Len wondered when Mick had become the person to care when someone else took a beating for him, or otherwise inconvenienced themselves for Mick’s sake. Mick always just shrugged it off, grumbled about how he hadn’t asked for the help so now they could deal with the fallout themselves, and disappeared.

So really, why would it be different this time? But Len had already suspected that maybe there was something about rich, frazzled, always smiley Raymond Palmer that drew Mick in. He wasn’t obvious about it, so he doubted anyone but himself would notice it, but Mick was always watching Raymond, and not in a hostile way either. There was something about him that had clearly gotten Mick’s interest. And he had to admit it, the guy was cute. Cute, infectious smile that was so happy, and yet he so clearly hid all his hurt behind that smile. Mick had a thing for broken people, Len could very well attest to that. He was one of those himself, after all, and Mick had taken him in and they were making each other a bit more whole again… sometimes. They also knew very well how to rip the other apart. Their relationship wasn’t always a healthy one, really.

But right now, it was clear that Mick would not budge, that he was determined to carry Raymond out of the gulag, no matter the risk. And despite his arguing, Len knew that he had already lost. He’d lost the moment Mick had set his mind to rescuing Raymond. Len might be the strong-willed one of the two of them, but when Mick really wanted something, he would always get it in the end. 

So not long after, they were sneaking through the hallways, Raymond a heavy weight on Mick’s shoulders. Len wanted to curse him for making it that obvious that they were escaping, wanted to argue again, but he saw the gentle way that Mick held the other man, the way he kept checking that he was still breathing and that he didn’t hit Raymond’s head against any walls, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. 

“Let’s get out of here, come on,” he murmured and turned another corner, tugging Mick along with him. What greeted him was a madly laughing elderly man who no doubt fancied himself a scientist, and Len had no time to debate what was in the glass valve that the man was hurling towards them before it hit him in the face, splattering a clear substance everywhere that quickly turned into smoke, and then everything went black. 

When he came to again the first thing he noticed was that he had the mother of all headaches, and the second was that the body beside him was very much not Mick. He opened his eyes and turned his head, squinting against the too-bright light to make out Raymond Palmer’s head resting on his shoulder, his body snuggled close to Len’s. Both of them were wearing pyjamas. Before he could wonder any more, there was a light touch on his other side and he turned his head to see Mick standing next to the bed that he was lying on… the bed he shared with Mick on the Waverider. 

“Wha-appened?” he murmured, feeling as if his whole body was made of lead and even his tongue was too heavy to properly pronounce anything. 

“Got some chemicals tossed at us, and got knocked out. Blondie ‘n the others got us out”, Mick told him and sat down on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle the mattress. “Hit your head pretty hard when you went down, boss.” Len nodded, even if only half of what was said went into his head, and then made a questioning noise, pointing his head in the direction of the sleeping Dr. Palmer in their bed. 

“Gideon says he needs some rest. Got quite banged up. So he’s sleeping here. For quartine ‘n shit.”

“For what now?” Len asked, carefully pushing himself up, trying to ignore the pained whimper that drew out of Raymond. He moved even more carefully then and settled him down again on his chest, where he could continue sleeping. For now.

“Mister Rory, Doctor Palmer and you are quarantined for the moment,” Gideon informed him, her voice loud enough to make him flinch, so she continued to speak more quietly. “The unknown chemical you were hit with might have contained microorganisms of unknown nature, so you are to stay separated from the rest of the team until it has been cleared that you are not infectious.” Len nodded, and looked down at the sleeping man on his chest. 

“And he’s in our room… why, exactly? He has his own room to be quarantined in.”

“Keepin’ an eye on him. And stuff. ‘S easier this way.”

Len raised an eyebrow at Mick, but Mick didn’t take the bait. Instead, he looked down at Raymond with a look that could only be described as soft, and gently brushed some hair away from his forehead, revealing some nasty looking cuts and bruises.

“Easier this way… sure,” Len grumbled, but didn’t put up any more protest. Who was he to stand in the way of Mick’s happiness, after all? And besides… having Raymond cuddled up with him… it wasn’t as terrible as it could be, really. 

“Need to piss though, let me up.” Together, they managed to gently lift Raymond off of Len so he could climb out of bed, sway in place with a bout of dizziness, cling to the nightstand, and then finally walk to their bath-

“Mick… since when to we have a bathroom attached to our room?” 

Mick just shrugged, still petting Raymond’s hair and sitting on the bed. “Qua ran... stuff.”

Len shrugged in return as well, he wouldn’t complain if he got a bit more comfort out of this, and went to use the loo. 

When he returned, Raymond was up as well, looking bleary and sleepy with the way he was sitting on the bed, eyes barely open, and his hair an absolute bird’s nest. Len was sure that if Mick kept looking at him like that, his eyes would remain permanently heart shaped. And yet, he couldn’t help but walk over, just to run his fingers through Raymond’s hair in a vain attempt to fix it. 

“S’rry… didn’t mean to fall asleep again,” Raymond murmured, then tried to sit up more even though it clearly still pained him to move.

“Mick says rest is what you need anyway,” Len told him and sat down on a chair, looking around their bare room. “So… what things are we going to do now, as we’re stuck in here anyway?”

It became almost a game, over the next few days, a challenge. Who would come up with something that would occupy them for the longest?

Mick had a deck of cards hidden in his clothes, that occupied them for a few hours, until Ray got so tired and achy that he almost fell off his chair. Len made a mental note to keep an eye out for him and his tendencies to push himself too hard. 

Using Gideon to call the other members of the team worked just fine, but only for a few minutes at a time, usually, before either Captain Hunter shut them down or some other mission suddenly came up that of course left no time to so much as say goodbye. 

Teasing Raymond worked… but only until he got all quiet and withdrawn, and they had to work on making sure he knew they never really meant anything bad with it… which he seemed to find hard to believe. Len found himself wanting to punch whoever had taken away his self-esteem and sense of self-worth. 

Working out tended to work for a while. Ray got incredibly flustered when Mick demonstrated that he could bench-press him, and Len laughed so hard that he fell from his chair and hit his head on the nightstand. The resulting clean- up at least took up some time, and Len pretended not to notice that not only Mick, but also Ray kissed the cut on top of his head better. But really, it didn’t hurt all that badly afterwards. 

They took turns reading The Lord of the Rings to one another, but only the first book, since that was the only one that was in their bedroom, and not in Mick’s work room. After three rounds, it got a bit boring without the possibility to switch to the second book. 

Gideon let them call Lisa once.  But only once, since the plan was to go back to Central City the moment that they left, so it wouldn’t do to mess too much with time and call Lisa at different points in her time. A s soon as the video came online she laughed and said she didn’t know they’d acquired a third, that they’d found a cute one, and asked when the wedding would be. Ray got so red and fidgety that they soon ended the call again so they could work on calming Ray down a bit. But at least it had killed some twenty minutes.

Sleeping always tended to work as well. Len knew it would kill their sleep schedules, but they took several naps during the day, curled up with the three of them just like they were at night, Mick and Len curled up around Ray, keeping their arms around him almost protectively while he snuggled into them, his hands holding them tightly, as if he was afraid that come morning, they would be gone. 

All in all, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Mick and Ray were making heart eyes at one another the entire time, and Len supposed that sometimes, when Ray was looking especially cute or said something particularly weird, his own expression was not far off from what Mick was sporting nonstop. Maybe, after this was over, they wouldn’t need to go back to sleeping in their bed with just the two of them. 

But sometimes, he couldn’t help but worry. Ray was laughing with them and keeping up with their workouts the best he could, and yet, there seemed to be something off about him. He tired easily, he was still pale, and sometimes Len saw him wincing when he thought that neither he nor Mick were looking. He could tell that Mick had noticed, too, but any attempt at trying to ask Ray about it, or quietly ask Gideon for a screening of Ray was met with a big smile and a shake of his head. 

“No, I’m fine, really! There’s nothing to worry about!”

There surely was something to worry about when he woke up in the middle of the night to find Ray hunched over the toilet bowl, pale and shaking and clearly having just brought his dinner back up.

Len placed a hand over his forehead only to find it clammy, but still burning up. “Looks like you caught something there, Raymond,” he murmured and filled one of the plastic cups at the sink to let Ray rinse out his mouth. “You gonna be okay?”

“It seems that a particle of a weapon still left in Dr. Palmer’s body is affecting his health. His body is trying to reject it, thus creating a fever with flu-like symptoms. I suggest moving Dr. Palmer to the med bay and removing the particle.”

Gideon’s business-like voice did nothing to calm Len’s nerves, and he gripped the edge of the sink hard, turning his knuckles white, to prevent himself from slamming his fist into the wall. 

“Are you telling me that there is a piece of a weapon used on Raymond _still inside his body and no one took it out?_ ”

He didn’t even listen to Gideon’s explanations, but simply grabbed a loopy looking Ray and scooped him up, bustling out of the bathroom and out of their room, down the hallway and into the medbay. Only later would he realise that all this time, their room hadn’t been locked, and that apparently the others were trusting them to stay inside even at night while everyone was asleep. 

He just about tossed Ray down on one of the chairs and, with shaking, flying fingers, attached all the chords and cables that Gideon told him to. 

“’M fine,” Ray slurred, still looking pale and green and decidedly not fine. “Jus’ a stomach bug.”

_Sure, Boy Scout,_ Len thought, then stepped back to let Gideon do her thing. 

He hadn’t been waiting for long, looking at the light that now surrounded Ray, not allowing him to see what was happening, when Mick came to stand behind him. 

“S goin’ on?” he asked, letting Len lean backwards and into his husband’s strong chest.

“Apparently some kind of splinter of a weapon that they used on him, still stuck in his body, making him sick. Gideon’s gonna take it out now.”

Mick just gave a grunt as a reply, and then they both stood there, waiting until Gideon pulled back and they saw a pale, but decidedly less green-looking Ray on the chair. 

“He will need to get plenty of rest,” Gideon informed them, and Mick just hoisted Ray up in response, ready to carry him back to their room so he could rest and wake up there instead of the med bay. 

He still looked a bit feverish when they placed him down onto the bed, and even frowned in his sleep, but Len figured that that was normal at this point, considering Gideon had let them take him with just telling them he needed to rest. So they both sat there for a while, cooling Ray’s forehead and pretending not to hold his hands, before they snuggled in and went to sleep themselves again. 

It was two days later that their door slid open and a very smug-looking Sara Lance came walking inside. “Gideon gave us the all-clear! No more quarantine for you guys! But what was that she said about Ray needing rest? You’ve been in here for two weeks!”

Just then, her eyes fell on Ray where he was napping on the bed, hand protectively rested on the cut that had troubled him so much, where Gideon had taken out a shard of whatever they had used on him in that damn gulag. Sara frowned and walked over, careful not to disturb him as she sat down and ran a hand down his arm. 

“What happened here?” she asked, and Len rolled his eyes. 

“Why don’t you ask Gideon? And why did she not tell all of you, anyway?”

As it turned out, Gideon was able to give a precise summary of what had happened, a summary that she had apparently passed on to Captain Hunter who had then decided to not pass on the information. Len could see in Sara’s face that she was about to have  _words_ with the captain, and he would have loved to  be a fly on the wall  and listen in on that conversation. Maybe he could get Gideon to tell him what had happened afterwards. 

With their quarantine over, though, Len and Mick were only too happy to join the others in the mess hall, eating their way through a dinner that Mick had cooked, and Len was only too happy to be away from Gideon’s fabricated food again. Not that it was bad, it was just… very much not the same as Mick’s nice home-cooked meals.

They even fixed up a portion for Ray to take back to him, which he was only too happy to receive once he woke up and shuffled to sit up in bed. 

“No more quarantine then?” he asked over a piece of breaded chicken, and both Len and Mick shook their heads. 

“No more quarantine.”

“I should go back to my own room then,” Ray murmured, placing down his empty plate and trying to climb out of the bed. 

“You should do no such thing”, Len told him and pushed him right back to where he came from. “You can stay right here.”

“But… I’m in your way. I know you want to be alone again. And you don’t even like me, so… I’ll just...” He shuffled around again, this time successfully sliding out of the bed, even if it visibly pained him to do so. 

“Who says we don’t like you, Haircut?” Mick asked him, looking utterly confused. Len had to agree with that sentiment, even a blind man must have seen the heart eyes that Mick always gave Ray. 

“You always make fun of me,” Ray shrugged, grabbing onto the back of a chair to stabilize himself. “Leonard always calls me an idiot.”

“That’s called teasing, and you usually do it when you like someone,” Len drawled, leaning back against the bed. “Did you think we bullied you all this time?”

“I- did you… not?” It sounded so lost, and scared, that Len couldn’t help but to just step forward and take Ray in his arms, at the same time that Mick did it from the other side. 

“Not gonna bully someone I wanna kiss,” Mick grumbled, and from the hitch in Ray’s breath he really had been blind enough to not figure that one out. 

“You… what?” Ray pulled back from them, looking confused and pale. “But you two are together!”

“So what?” Mick shrugged, reaching for Ray again, who pulled back, staring at Mick disbelievingly. 

“You can’t just-”

“What my dearest partner means to say is, we are very much together, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t open for… more”, Len told him, stunning Ray for long enough that Mick could grab him after all and pull him close, sitting down on the bed with him before Ray collapsed – whether from shock or pain, that Len couldn’t judge. 

“But I… I’m not good”, Ray protested, causing Mick to raise an eyebrow at him. “I can’t… I can’t read emotions, and I talk too much, and I’m weird and too happy and too sad and I, I, I...” Len chuckled and walked over, crouching down in front of Ray. 

“So… you’re too much of some things, Mick is too little of some things, looks like I get the perfect balance.”

Mick just grunted at then, and then nodded after a moment. “Am shit with feelins, too”. 

“Yes you are, and yet you were making heart eyes at Ray so much I thought they would fall out,” Len teased him. 

“But I… I-- I--”

“Hey. You know if you say you don’t want to, we won’t ever push, right?” Len asked him, taking both of Ray’s hands into his. 

“No, it’s… I… I don’t have sex!!”

Ray flushed after almost shouting that out, and quickly turned away, staring resolutely at the wall. 

Mick just gave a dry snort. “Cool. We don’t do that shit either.”

“Yeah, what he said,” Len agreed and then reached up to place a hand on Ray’s cheek, turning his head back so he was looking at Len. “But do you kiss?”

Ray very much did kiss, as it turned out. And if, after a round of kisses with two thieves, he needed to lay down, they all pretended it was because they had taken his breath away so much, and not because of a still-healing wound in his stomach. 

“So… what made you take a beating for Mick?” Len asked, a bit later, curled up around Ray. Mick was gone for the moment, making use of their newfound freedom to go to his workroom and do a proper workout. Len made a mental note to take Ray to watch him sometime, just to see if Ray would drool over Mick’s muscles they way he did. 

“Um… emotions, I guess,” Ray murmured, blushing again, and Len chuckled. 

“You’re such an idiot,” he told him, barely able to hold the fondness out of his voice.

“You know, now that I have a clue, it doesn’t sound like bullying anymore,” Ray told him, and then reached over to grab Len’s shirt, pull him in and do some more of that kissing thing that he did, apparently, do. 

After three more days, Ray was well enough to not require strict bed rest anymore, so he had taken to wandering around the Waverider and catching up with all the others, just like Mick and Len had days before already. He finally seemed healed for good, just a scar remaining where he’d been pierced by that fateful weapon. And he was already back to joking with the others, smiling brightly and pushing away and lingering worry that they might have had. And really, wasn’t it the cutest sight to see Dr. Raymond Palmer beaming like the sun itself. 

It was only when he was curling up in bed with Mick that Len noticed something being amiss. Mick was still reading, so caught up in his novel that he barely even noticed what was going on, but Len took note of a distinct lack of starfishing, cuddly scientist in their bed. 

Grumbling, he crawled back out of bed, barefoot and just in his pyjamas, and went to search. He didn’t need to look for long, as one glance into Ray’s room revealed the man in question, lying in his bed under the blankets, perfectly tucked in,  lying stiffly as if he was a doll in his doll-bed , no trace of the starfishing cutie in their bed the nights before. He was also very much awake.

He sat up when Len appeared in his doorway, reaching over to turn on the nightstand. “...Len? What are you doing here?”

“I came to ask you that same question, Raymond. Why are _you_ here?”

“This is… my room?”

“And why are you trying to sleep in said room, if there’s a perfectly good bed in our room as well, pray tell?”

Ray sat up a bit straighter, fidgeting with the edge of his blanket. “I’m well again now, so you don’t need to babysit me anymore. You can… have your peace again, I’ll be out of your hair.”

Len sighed and walked over, sitting on the edge of the bed, much like he would do with Lisa when she had nightmares as a child. 

“So… this feelings thing, that you’re bad at? Let me spell it out for you. I have feelings for you. Mick has feelings for you. We want you in our room. In our bed. In our life. In our arms. I want to be hit in the head at night and not need to worry because I know it’s only you and your flying limbs. I want to wake up in the morning and kiss both of you even though we all have terrible morning breath. So… did you want any of that as well?”

Ray was looking at him with wide eyes, but then his lips quirked into a smirk that made Len feel very proud. 

“What about goodnight kisses?”

And just for that, Len carried him back to their room like a sack of potatoes.


End file.
